Are Meta Description Tags Important?

A common question in SEO is "How valuable are the Meta Description tags?". Strictly speaking, meta tags are optional. Your Web pages will display in a browser without any meta tags and anyone who has worked in SEO or worked with an SEO company knows that Meta tags can be abused to almost the infinite degree.  In a recent SEO factors ranking discussion, a handful of leaders in the SEO industry, generally agreed that the overall value of Meta Descriptions, as it relates purely to organic keyword relevance is minimal and the overall importance in an SEO campaign (on these factors) is average at best (a 2.39 point value out of 5). Most agreed however, that having good Meta Descriptions gives website owners better ability to "control" the message that is read by search engines and (potentially) read by users of search engines.

Jill Whalen wrote a very good article on ways that webmasters can better optimize their sites Meta Descriptions so that they appear, in search results, when strategic keywords are entered.  The bottom line is that the Meta Description, for a strategic keyword, can appear in the search results, if it is written correctly.  The value to this is that the website ownes now have some control over the message they are giving to potential customers and buyers.  Value is found in the click, not necessarily the search rankings when it comes to SEO and more importantly, SEM.

How powerful can this be in real world terms?  I recently revisited eight of he last websites that I had worked on, five of which I specifically worked on Meta Descriptions for the purposes of keyword relevance and three which I did not, or, the descriptions were altered for one reason or another.  In all five examples of sites I had worked on, the main pages I had focused on (products pages, solutions pages, the home page etc), showed the page's Meta Description when searching for the specific keyword that I was targeting.  All five show controlled, targeted marketing messages.  Of the three I did not succeed in getting recommendations through to, none show the Meta Description in search results for the primary keyword.  Does this mean that their search description is bad?  Not necessarily.  But it does mean that they are relying on outside search engine factors to display what their search message really is. 

Finally, what could this mean in terms of real dollars based on click thru's?  In a retail example, the top keyword generates approximately 15% of all referring search traffic but over 33% of all conversions.  There is no PPC being used on coordination with organic search results.  In a B2B scenario, 2 major brand-based secondary keywords that were targeted in our organic SEO strategy, with appropriate Meta Descriptions being displayed, represented a 10% conversion rate, as compared to an average overall conversion rate of less than 2%.  Obviously there are other factors at play in both scenarios - brand awareness, search objectives, competitive visibility, but the fact of the matter is that the website owner now has control over the message of the website for a specific, targeted keyword phrase.  It's their own defined message that the user is seeing in search results.